VampyrZ on a Boat – review

Director: Mark Allen Michaels

Release date: 2022

Contains spoilers

This, apparently, is the third of a trilogy of films by Mark Allen Michaels, which contain much the same actors (and sometimes the same character names) but are otherwise unrelated – the Fiancé being a bigfoot film and Valentine DayZ a zombie movie. This, obviously by the title, is a vampire movie. But boy is it strange.

After a scene in a boat’s corridor with a couple of guys opening up a sealed room and clearly facing... something... the film cuts to a pier and beneath it sit Del (Curt Lambert) and Max (Dallas Valdez). Del is due to work security on a boat owned by his uncle (Robert Acres) and wants Max to come along. He refuses (citing one-eyed cat ownership as the reason) until Sara (Carrie Keagan) comes along and it is clear she is going also.

meeting with Captain Bob

Having met uncle (or should I say Captain) Bob – who carries an ancestor's peg-leg for good luck – the pair go to the security room and Bob shows him a room – cameras blacked out by the medical research company but heat signatures detectable. There is a person (Kendall Wells) sat, never moving, suggests Del but the strangest thing is the sound he appears to make – that of a bat. Max excuses himself and finds Sara – they very quickly get it on.

pustule

However, all is not well. We hear an insect buzzing and the boat’s chef is bitten by something, develops a pustule and quickly turns. There is a slaughter (off screen) in the mess. Max and Del speak to the medical researcher (Kate Rees Davies) who says the man in the room was at least 400 years old and she was studying him to get all sorts of scientific breakthroughs but also mentions that Sara was a reporter on scene when he was found and he seems to react to her – Max realises she is in danger but it’s too late, she has been bitten and turned.

head wound

So, it’s rescue Sara and the film goes weird. As well as Max being immune to being turned (the reason for which is kind of explained in a mid-credits sequence) he ends up with a huge metal tool in his head and, when it is freed (and his skull superglued) he ends up in a time-loop in which something will go wrong and he’ll get brained, fixed and the loop restarts. He is the only one remembering the loop, it seems. The vampires also seem to vanish at will and it wasn’t clear if they are phasing out, super-fast or unstuck in time.

Carrie Keagan as Sara

Onboard the ship, the skeletal crew seems fairly large and very oddball. There is even a permanent, smoking jacket wearing passenger. It all leads to some very oddball moments and this is the joy and frustration of the film. It isn’t overly clear what the rules are or why the time-loop happens, it all just is but the cast are personable and the set works (shooting took place on the S.S. Lane Victory, apparently). The acting isn’t bad but the scenario doesn’t overtly lead to audience buy in – does Max come across as a retired deep state fixer – maybe… who knows what one would look like, but the May to December romance is perhaps not as believable. If you want an oddball 71 minutes then this will work – just don’t expect any sense of what just happened or horror, particularly. For others this will frustrate. 4 out of 10 is about fair.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK